In Mobile Internet Protocol version 4 (MIPv4), when a Mobile Node (MN) registers with the ‘D’ bit, in the MIP Registration to a Home Agent (HA), then the MN wishes to use a Co-located Care-of address (CCoA) with a specific Home Address (HoA). Packets sent to the MN Home Address (HoA) will then be encapsulated in the CCoA by the HA and forwarded directly to the MN. Alternatively, a MN can obtain from the local Foreign Agent (FA) a shared FA CoA for inclusion in its MIP Registration to the FA/HA. In this case, the HA encapsulates to the FA CoA, and the Foreign Agent then decapsulates and delivers the HoA addressed packet unencapsulated to the MN.
Mobile IP (v4/v6), also indicated as MIPv4 [MIPv4] and MIPv6 [MIPv6], enables a mobile node (MN) to register its temporary location indicated by a care-of-address (CoA) to its Home Agent (HA). MIPv6 is described in D. Johnson, C. Perkins, “Mobility Support in IPv6”, Internet-Draft, draft-ietf-mobileip-ipv6-16.txt (work in progress), Mar. 22, 2002. The HA then keeps a mapping (also called a binding) between the MN's permanent address, otherwise called Home Address (HoA), and the registered CoA so that packets for that MN can be redirected to its current location using IP encapsulation techniques (tunneling). The CoA used by a MN can be an address that belongs to a Foreign Agent (FA) when MIPv4 is used or, in MIPv4 and MIPv6, it can be a temporarily allocated address to the MN itself in which case is called a collocated care-of-address (CCoA).
During MIP hand-off, the FAs are generally used to reroute traffic from the old FA (oFA) to the new FA (nFA). This however is only possible from the oFA if the MN was using a FA CoA at that oFA. The oFA can then change the CoA to either a CCoA of a MN or a FA CoA at the new FA. The oFA could also switch CCoAs if it has the necessary state and permissions, and the newFA could also deal with CCoAs if it is able to similarly deal with them correctly.
In MIPv4, when a MN registers with the ‘D’ bit, in the MIP Registration to a Home Agent through a Foreign Agent, then the MN wishes to use a Co-located Care-of address (CCoA) with a specific Home Address (HoA). Packets sent to the MN Home Address (HoA) will then be encapsulated in the CCoA by the HA and forwarded directly to the MN via the best route from any FA advertising the subnet of that address. In addition, the MN can use that CCoA as a topologically correct source/destination address for local access on the visited subnet. Different address prefixes are commonly used by different addressing domains. In CCoA based reverse tunneling, the MN can encapsulate the HoA itself into its Co-located Care of Address (CCoA) to cause the packet to be reverse tunneled to the HA. The MN can in addition leave the HoA unencapsulated so that the FA delivers the packet natively and unencapsulated to the destination address. This is known as selective reverse tunneling and is possible whether or not the MN registers via the local FA.
Alternatively, a MN can use a shared FA CoA advertised to it by the FA in an Agent Advertisement. In this case, the HA encapsulates to the FA CoA who then decapsulates and delivers the HoA addressed packet natively unencapsulated to the MN. When reverse tunneling, the MN can select during MIP registration between the default Direct Delivery Style and the optional Encapsulating Delivery Style.
In Direct Delivery Style, the MN sends packets unencapsulated via the FA using the HoA as a source address, and the FA undertakes the encapsulation of those packets towards the HA using the FA CoA as the source address of the tunnel.
In Encapsulating Delivery Style, the MN instead encapsulates packets with the HoA as a source address towards the FA, which after decapsulating, inspects the visitor list and then re-encapsulates into a tunnel with the FA CoA as the source address. In addition, once Encapsulating Delivery Style has been negotiated with the FA, then the MN can selectively bypass reverse tunneling by sending packets unencapsulated from the HoA.
MIPv6 has the use of a CCoA by the MN as the normal method of tunneling due to the better address availability and allocation mechanisms compared to IPv4.
The MN and the FA in existing MIP specs are therefore able to selectively send and receive packets, either unencapsulated, or encapsulated using the HoA as an inner source/destination address and a CoA as the outer address. When sending unencapsulated between each other, the MN and the FA avoid the additional bandwidth incurred by a tunnel header. By using a FA CoA, the MN is however deprived of a local topologically correct address (so preserving address space) but is able to selectively avoid tunneling over the access link, which is beneficial in cellular and other access systems. By using a CCoA, the MN gets a topologically correct address (where addresses are available) but then incurs the overhead of the additional tunnel header for incoming traffic and during any reverse tunneling operations. The use of a MN specific MIP tunnel address can also be useful for QoS support. What is missing in MIP is the ability for the MN to acquire a MN specific FA CoA that provides the MN with a topologically correct local address yet whose tunnel encaps/decaps is provided by the FA.
In view of the above discussion, it can be appreciated that it would be beneficial if a way could be found to provide MNs with an MN specific FA CoA and if ways of using tunnelling with such addresses could be developed which would allow tunnelling using such addresses even though ends of the created tunnels may be in addressing domains which use different address prefixes.